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Erase Hard Drive

winterlady

Posted 14 March 2009 - 08:33 AM

winterlady

Member

Member

31 posts

I am looking for some help with erasing my hard drive on my old pc I just recently bought a new pc but now I'm left with trying to figure out what to do with my old pc with my data on it still. I did a little research on hard drive erasers and found what some were calling "one of the best" and downloaded it from harddriveeraser.org, put it on a disc and tried to run it on my old pc but it kept saying "C" drive was in use, no kidding??
I have copied and pasted what the instructions were in the help section of this eraser it states the following: The usage of Hard Drive Eraser is very simple. You pick a drive you want to erase, choose a shredding scheme (an algorithm used for shredding) and file system, and press "Start" to execute drive erasing. You can only erase a hard drive, or partition which is not used as a system partition from within the program is running. To further explain, if you have a C: as you system disk or partition you can only erase D, E, F etc. partitions. If you want to erase C partition, the one where operating system reside, you would have to access it from the other instance of operating system from other partition, or preferably take out the drive from the computer, connect it to another computer and erase it from there. One hard drive can have more than one partition, and if you want to erase the whole hard drive you should erase all its partitions.
I have to admit I am a computer novice really and do not understand what all that really means! Why would you take out the drive from the computer, connect it to another computer and erase it from there?? I am totally confused, is there an easier way to do this or at least instructions in terms I might understand?? I sure don't want to just throw my old pc away with all my personal data still on it, in our local community one of the churches holds this thing every spring where you can bring in things like old pc's and they will dispose of them for you. PLEASE HELP!!!!